Fabled for its off-the-beaten track location, gourmet restaurant Koks is now even harder to reach. It has uprooted from the Faroe Islands, and until 2023, moved to a small village in western Greenland that’s located more than 200km inside the Arctic Circle.
Here, rugged nature serves up a wild harvest of seafood and game, from prawns and halibut to reindeer and muskox (a horned and shaggy-haired bovine that resembles a bison).
Faroese chef Poul Andrias Ziska honed his craft in the harsh North Atlantic but has now reimagined his signature locavore cooking for a Greenlandic terroir.
Crispy shrimp heads with beady eyes and antennae; delicately smoked salmon sandwiched between bubbly fish-skin crackers; and tender morsels of scarlet-red ptarmigan (a bird found in mountainous northern climes) breast skewered with a white-feathered wing bone are among the dishes awaiting curious diners who seek out a table at the only Michelin-starred restaurant in the Arctic.
Greenland, like the Faroe Islands, is an autonomous Danish territory. Eighty percent of its enormous landmass is covered by a vast ice sheet and glaciers, while its tiny 56,000 population mostly lives along the coast.
“We have been thinking a lot about doing something in Greenland, because I’ve always found it very fascinating,” said Ziska, who had long hoped to host an event or pop-up in the country together with other regional chefs. Meanwhile, a catalogue of problems with the premises back home was a tipping point that motivated him to relocate. “[Greenland is] similar, but then again so very different to where we come from.”
